THE HIGH
PRIEST CAIAPHAS
The Sanhedrin was the assembly of the
chiefs, the supreme council of the aristocracy which ruled the capital. It was
composed of the priests jealous of the patrons of the Temple which gave them
their power and their stipends: of the Scribes responsible for preserving the
purity of the law and of tradition: of the Elders who represented the
interests of the moderate, moneyed middle-class.
They were all in accord that it was essential to take
Jesus on false pretenses and to have Him killed as a blasphemer against the
Sabbath and the Lord. Only Nicodemus attempted a defense, but they were able
quickly to silence him. "What do we?
For this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will
believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and
nation." (John 11:47-48) It is the Reason of State, the Salvation of
the Fatherland which political cliques always bring out to screen with legality
and ideality the defense of their particular profit.
Caiaphas, who that year was High Priest, settled their doubts with the
maxim which has always justified in the eyes of the world the immolation
of the innocent. "Ye know nothing
at all nor consider that it is expedient that one man should die for the people
and that the whole nation perish not." (John 11:49-50) This maxim in
Caiaphas' mouth, and on this occasion, and for what it meant, was infamous, and
hypocritical like all the speeches made by the Sanhedrin. But transposed into a
higher meaning and transferred into the Absolute, changing nation into
humanity, the President of the circumcised noble class was expounding a
principle which Jesus Himself had accepted and which has become under another
form the crucial mystery of Christianity. Caiaphas did not know—he who had to
enter alone into the Holy of Holies to offer up to Jehovah the sins of the
people—how much his words, coarse in expression and cynical in sentiment as
they were, were in accord with his Victim's thought.
The thought that only the righteous can pay for
injustice, that only the perfect can discount the crimes of the base, that only
the pure can cancel the debts of the shameful, that only God in His infinite
magnificence can expiate the sins which man has committed against Him; this
thought, which seems to man the height of madness exactly because it is the
height of divine wisdom, certainly did not flash out in the corrupt soul of the
Sadducee when he threw to his sixty accomplices the fabricated argument
destined to silence their last remorse. Caiaphas, who together with the crown
of thorns and the sponge of vinegar was to be one of the instruments of the
Passion, did not imagine in that moment that he was bearing witness solemnly,
though involuntarily, to the divine tragedy about to begin.
And yet the principle that the innocent can pay for the
guilty, that the death of one man can be salvation for all, was not foreign to
the consciousness of ancient peoples. The heroic myths of the pagans recognize
and celebrate voluntary sacrifices of the innocent. They record the example of
Pilades, who offered himself to be punished in place of the guilty Orestes;
Macaria of the blood of Heracles, who saved her brother's life with her own;
Alcestis, who died that she might avert from her Admetus the vengeance of
Artemis; the daughters of Erechtheus, who
sacrificed themselves that their father might escape Neptune's blows. The old
King Codrus, who threw himself into the Ilissus, in order that his Athenians might
be victorious; and Decius Mus and his sons, who consecrated themselves to the
Manes that the Romans might triumph over the Samnites; and Curtius, who, fully
armed, cast himself into the gulf for the salvation of his country; and
Iphigenia, who offered her throat to the knife that Agamemnon's fleet might
sail safely towards Troy. At Athens during the Thargelian feast two men were
killed to save the city from divine wrath; Epimenides the Wise, to purify
Athens, profaned by the assassination of the followers of Cylon, had recourse
to human sacrifice over the tombs; at Curium, in Cyprus, at Terracina, at
Marseilles, every year a man threw himself into the sea as payment for the
crimes of the community, a man regarded as the Savior of the people.
But these sacrifices, when they were spontaneous, were
for the salvation of one being alone, or of a restricted group of men; when
they were enforced they added a new crime to those they were intended to
expiate; they were examples of individual
affection or of superstitious crimes.
No man had yet appeared who would take upon his head all
the sins of men, a God who would imprison Himself in the abject wretchedness of
flesh to save all the human race and to give it the power to ascend from baseness
to sanctity, from earthly humiliation to the Kingdom of Heaven. The perfect
man, who takes upon himself all imperfections, the pure man who burdens himself
with all shames, the righteous man who shoulders the unrighteousness of all
men, had appeared under the aspect of a poor fugitive from justice in the day
of Caiaphas. He who was to die for all, the Galilean working-man who was
disquieting the rich and the priests of Jerusalem, was there on the Mount of
Olives only a short distance from the Sanhedrin. The Seventy, who knew not what
they did, who did not know that they were obeying the will of the very man they
were persecuting, decided to have Him captured before the Passover; but because
they were cowardly, like all men of possessions, one thing restrained them, the
fear of the people who loved Jesus. They consulted that they might take Jesus
by restraint and kill Him. But they said, "Not
on the feast day lest there be an uproar among the people." (Matt.
26:5; Mark 14:2) To solve their difficulty, by good fortune, there came to them
the day after one of the Twelve, he who held the purse, Judas Iscariot.
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